Part 8

Sherman with 60,000 men and 2500 wagons but only 60 guns marched out, and none knew what his destination was. A retreat from Atlanta comparable only to Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow was about to commence. The hostile farming population of Georgia and the Carolinas should harass the Yankee army as the Russian peasants had done the French in 1812. That was the Southern belief and the substance of Southern propaganda at the time. Not so the Northern Army, which had the consciousness of victory and a radiant belief in its cause and in its general. “A feeling of exhilaration seemed to pervade all minds, a feeling of something to come, vague and undefined, still full of venture and intense interest. Even the common soldiers caught the inspiration, and many a group called out: ‘Uncle Billy, I guess Grant is waiting for us at Richmond.’ The general sentiment was that we were marching for Richmond and that there we should end the war, but how and when they seemed to care not, nor did they measure the distance, or count the cost in life, or bother their brains about the great rivers to be crossed and the food required for man and beast that had to be gathered by the way.”[3]

Sherman himself had not decided on what point exactly he would march. But he never intended to march against Lee at Richmond, though the South and his own soldiers believed it. He always designed to reach the sea and reopen maritime communication with the North, and kept in mind Savannah, Port Royal, and even Pensacola in North Florida. So universal was the belief that he was marching on Richmond by way of Augusta that in all the country districts of Georgia where the left wing marched they will tell you still that the enemy was marching on Augusta.

_You shall maintain discipline, patience, and courage_, said Sherman to his army. _And I will lead you to achievements equal to any of the past. We are commencing a long and difficult march to a new base, but all the chances of war have been provided for. The habitual order of march will be by four roads as nearly parallel as possible. The columns will start habitually at 7 a. m. and make about 15 miles a day. The army will forage liberally on the country during the march. Horses, mules, and wagons belonging to the inhabitants may be appropriated by the cavalry and artillery freely and without limit, discriminating, however, between the rich, who are usually hostile, and the poor and industrious, usually neutral or friendly. All foragers will refrain from abusive or threatening language, and they will endeavor to leave each family reasonable means of sustenance. Negroes who are able-bodied and serviceable may be taken along if supplies permit. All non-combatants and refugees should go to the rear and be discouraged from encumbering us. Some ether time we may be able to provide for the poor Whites and Blacks seeking to escape the bondage under which they are now suffering. To corps commanders alone is entrusted the power to destroy mills, houses, cotton gins, etc., but the measure of the inhabitants’ hostility should be the measure of the ruin which commanders should enforce._[4]

There was much more said in those very finely written and emphatic orders, but the sentence that captured the imagination of the common soldier was certainly “the army will forage liberally on the country” which at once became a common gag among the men. For it spelt loot and fun and treasure trove and souvenirs and everything else that stirs a soldier’s mind. There is a human note throughout the whole of General Sherman’s orders, but no softness, rather an inexorable sternness. He had no patience with the cause of the Rebels nor with their ways of fighting. He and his staff were not averse from the idea of reading the population of Georgia and South Carolina a terrible lesson. While the march was military it inevitably became punitive. The cotton was destroyed, the farms pillaged, the slaves set free, the land laid waste. It was over a comparatively narrow strip of country, but Sherman was like the wrath of the Lord descending upon it.

So out marched the four divisions (14th, 15th, 17th, and 20th) joyously singing as they went the soldiers’ songs of the war—

One and Free

and

He who first the Flag would lower SHOOT HIM ON THE SPOT.

and all manner of variants of John Brown to the Glory Hallelujah chorus.

The way out from Atlanta is now a road of cheap shops and Jewish pawnbrokers, Negro beauty parlors, bag shops, gaudy cinema and vaudeville sheds, fruit stalls and booths of quack doctors and magic healers, vendors of the Devil’s corn cure, fortune tellers, and what not. A Negro skyscraper climbs upward. It is decidedly a “colored neighborhood,” and rough crowds of Negro laborers and poor Whites frolic through the litter of the street. Painfully the electric cars sound their alarms and budge and stop, and budge again, threading their way through the masses, glad to get clear after half a mile of it and then plunge into the comparative spaciousness of villadom outside the city.

It is not as it was of yore. Where the bloody July battle of Atlanta raged a complete peace has now settled down amid the dignified habitations of the rich. Trees hide the view, and children play upon the lawns of pleasant houses while the older folk rock to and fro upon the chairs of shady verandas.

Dignified Decatur dwells on its hill by the wayside, and has reared its pale monument to the Confederate dead. On this white obelisk the cause of the South is justified. Within sight of it rises an impressive courthouse, which by its size and grandeur protests the strength of the law in a county of Georgia.

There was a gloomy sky with lowering clouds, and a warm, clammy atmosphere as if the air had been steamed over night and was now cooling a little. The road leaving behind Decatur and the suburbs of Atlanta became deep red, almost scarlet in hue, and ran between broad fields of cotton where every pod was bursting and puffing out in cotton wool. Men with high spindle-wheeled vehicles came with cotton bales done up in rough hempen netting. Hooded buggies rolled sedately past with spectacled Negroes and their wives. Drummers in Ford cars tooted and raced through the mud. Thus to Ingleside, where a turn in the road reveals the huge hump of Stone Mountain, shadowy and mystical like uncleft Eildons. All the soldiers as they bivouacked there or marched past on that bright November day of ‘64 remarked the mountain, and their gaze was turned to it in the spirit of curiosity and adventure.

I fell in with a Mr. McCaulay who was a child when Sherman marched through. He thought the Germans in Belgium hardly equaled Sherman. Not only did his troops burn Atlanta but almost every house in the country. He pointed out new houses that had sprung up on the ruins of former habitations.

... “A fence used to run right along here, and there were crops growing. No, not cotton; there was not the demand for cotton in those days, and not nearly so much grown in the State. Over on that side of the road there was a huge encampment of soldiers, and I remember stealing out to it to listen to the band.

“The foragers came to the houses and took every bit of food—left us bone dry of food. They also took our horses and our mules and our cows and our chickens. Sometimes a family would have a yoke of oxen hidden in the wood, but that would be all that they had. Everyone had to flee, and all were destitute. It was a terrible time. But we all stood by one another and shared one another’s sorrows and helped one another as we could.

“All colored folk also stood by us. I expect you’ve read, ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin,’ and ‘The Leopard’s Spots,’ but the picture is terribly overdrawn there.”

“I did not know these told the story of the march,” said I.

“They do not. But they give an account of the Negroes that is entirely misleading. The North has queered the Negro situation by sending all manner of people down here to stir the Negro up against us. Till we said, ‘You and your niggers can go to the devil’—and we left them alone.

“But that was a mistake, and we are realizing it now, and intend to take charge of the education of the Negro ourselves, and be responsible for him spiritually as well as physically. There never was a better relationship between us than there is now.

“And I—I was brought up among them as a child, as an equal, played with them, wallowed with them in the dirt, slept with them. They’re as near to me as flesh and blood can be.”

It was curious to receive this outpouring when I had not mentioned the Negro to him at all and seemed merely curious concerning Sherman’s march. It is, however, characteristic of the South: the subject of the treatment of the Negro recurs like _idée fixe_.

At Lithonia, after a meal of large yellow yams and corn and chicken and biscuits and cane syrup, I called on old Mrs. Johnson, who lived over the way from Mrs. Jones. Lithonia was much visited by the cavalry. Decatur was stripped of everything, and Lithonia fared as badly in the end. Men came into the farmyard and there and then killed the hogs and threw them on to waiting wagons. These were foragers from the camps outside Atlanta. But one day someone came with the news—“Sherman has set fire to the great city and he’ll be here to-morrow.” And sure enough on the morrow his army began to appear on the road—the vanguard, and after that there seemed no end to the procession. The army was all day marching past with its commissariat wagons and its water wagons, its horses, its mules, and regiment after regiment. The despoiled farm wives and old folk could not help being thrilled, though they were enemies. General Slocum, who commanded the left wing of the army, wrote his name in pencil on granny’s doorpost when he stopped at her house with one or two of his staff.

The Confederate soldiers were “Johnny Rebs” and the Union soldiers were “Billy Yanks.” Neither side was known to have committed any crimes against women or children, and the latter were crazy to watch the Yanks go by, though often their fathers were away in the hard-pressed Rebel armies.

As I walked along the red road betwixt the fluffy cotton fields from village to village and from mansion to mansion, those stately farmhouses of the South, I was always on the lookout for the oldest folk along the way. The young ones knew only of the war that was just past, the middle-aged thought of the old Civil War as somewhat of a joke, but the only thing the old folks will never laugh over is the great strife which with its before and after made the very passion of their lives. So whenever I saw an old man or woman sitting on a veranda by the wayside I made bold to approach and ask what they knew of the great march, and how it had affected them, and the Negroes.

They told of the methodical destruction of the railways, and of the innumerable bonfires whose flames and smokes changed the look of the sky. Every rail tie or sleeper was riven from its bed of earth and burned, and the long steel rails were heated over the fires. To make the fires bigger timber was brought from the woods, and every rail was first made red-hot and then twisted out of shape—the favorite plan being for three or four soldiers to take the hot rail from the fire, place it between two trunks of standing pines, and then push till it was bent nigh double.

They told of the stillness after the army had gone, and of the sense of ruin which was upon them with their cotton destroyed, and all their stores for the winter pillaged, and their live stock driven off. An old dame told me how the only live animal in her neighborhood was a broken-down army horse left behind to die by the enemy. The folk were starving, but a woman resuscitated the horse and went off with him to try and bring food to the village. She walked by his side for fear he would drop down dead—and first of all she sought a little corn for the horse, for “Old Yank” as she called him. Many a weary mile they walked together, only to find that “Sherman’s bummers” had been there before her. She slept the night in a Negro hut (a thing no white woman would dream of doing now) and the Negroes fed her and gave corn to the horse and sent her on her way. Out of several old buggies and derelict wheels a “contrapshun” had been rigged out and tied to the old horse, but it was not until beyond Covington and Conyers that a place was found which the foragers had missed, and the strange buggy was loaded for home.

I spent a night in Conyers in beautiful country, and was away early next morning on the Covington road. The road was shadowy and sanguine. The heavy gossamer mist which closed out the view of the hills clothed me also with white rime. Warm, listless airs stole through the mist. On my right, away over to the heaviness of the mist curtain, was a sea of dark green spotted and flecked with white; on my left was the wretched single track of the railway to Covington rebuilt on the old levels where it was destroyed in ‘64. Wooden carts full to the rim with picked cotton rolled clumsily along the red ruts of the road, and jolly-looking Negroes sprawled on the top as on broad, old-fashioned cottage feather beds. And ever and anon there overtook me the inevitable “speed merchants,” hooting and growling and racketing from one side to the other of the broken way. I sat down on a stone in an old wayside cemetery, sun-bleached and yet hoary also with mist. Such places have a strange fascination, and I knew some of those who lay beneath the turf had lain unwitting also when the army went by. What old-fashioned names—Sophronias and Simeons and Claramonds and Nancies! On most of the graves was the gate of heaven and a crown, and on some were inscribed virtues, while on one was written “He belonged to the Baptist Church.” The oldest stones had all fallen and been washed over with red mud. Among the old were graves of slaves, I was told, but since the war no Black has been buried with the White.

An old Negro in cotton rags, grizzled white hair on his black, weather-beaten face, told me where the colored folk lay buried half a mile away, where he, too, would lay down his old back and rest from cotton picking at last. “But on de day ob Judgment dere be no two camps,” said he. “No, sir ... only black and white souls.” He remembered the joy night and the jubilation after the army passed through, and how all the colored boys danced and sang to be free, and then the disillusion and the famine and the misery that followed. The old fellow was a cotton picker, and had a large cotton bag like a pillow case slung from his shoulders—an antediluvian piece of Adamite material with only God and cotton and massa and the Bible for his world.

While sitting on this wayside stone I have the feeling that Sherman’s army has marched past me. It has gone over the hill and out of view. It has marched away to Milledgeville and Millen and Ebenezer and Savannah, and not stopped there. It has gone on and on till it begins marching into the earth itself. For all that are left of Sherman’s warriors are stepping inward into the quietness of earth to-day.

The mist lifts a little, and the hot sun streams through. The crickets, content that it is no longer twilight, have ceased chirping, and exquisite butterflies, like living flames, are on the wing. It is a beautiful part of the way, and where there is a sunken, disused road by the side of the new one I take it for preference. For probably it was along that the soldiers went. Now young pines are springing from their footsteps in the sand.

Here no cars have ever sped, and for a long while no foot has trod. The surface is smooth and unfooted like the seashore when the tide has ebbed away, and bright flowers greet the wanderer from unfarmed banks and gullies. So to Almon, where an old gaffer told me how he and some farm lads with shotguns had determined they would “get” Sherman when he came riding past with his staff, and how they hid behind a bush, where the Methodist church is now standing, and let fly. Sherman they missed, but hit someone else and they fled to the woods. He lost both his hat and his gun in the chase which followed, but nevertheless got away. Not that I believed in its entirety the old man’s story. It was his pet story, told for fifty years, and had become true for him. I came into Covington, a regular provincial town, whose chief feature is its large sandy square about which range its shops with their scanty wares. There I met another old man, a captain who served under Lee, and indeed surrendered with him. He had been beside Stonewall Jackson when the latter died. He was now eighty-four years, haunting the Flowers Hotel.

“This world’s a mighty empty place, believe me,” said he. “Eighty-four years ...!”

He seemed appalled at his own age.

“Threescore and ten is the allotted span.... At seventeen I went gold digging ... seeking gold ... it was the first rush of the digging mania in California, but I only got six hundred dollars worth.”

“At seventeen years many their fortunes seek But at fourscore it is too late a week”

said I sotto voce.

“A mighty empty place,” repeated the old captain, rocking his chair in the dusk. “Yes, Sherman marched through here. He burned all the cotton in the barns. I was born here, and lived here mos’ all my life, but I was with Lee then. That war ought never to have been. No, sir. It was all a mistake. We thought Abraham Lincoln the devil incarnate, but knew afterwards he was a good friend to the South. It’s all forgotten now. We bear the North no grudge except about the niggers——”

He interrupted himself to greet a pretty girl passing by, and he seemed offended if any woman passed without smiling up at him. But when he resumed conversation with me he reverted to “The world’s getting to be a mighty empty place ... eighty-four years ... threescore and ten is the allotted span, but....”

I turn therefore to the witness of the time, and the genius who conceived the march and watched his soldiers go. Thus Sherman wrote of Covington: “We passed through the handsome town of Covington, the soldiers closing up their ranks, the color bearers unfurling their flags, and the bands striking up patriotic airs. The white people came out of their houses to behold the sight, spite of their deep hatred of the invaders, and the Negroes were simply frantic with joy. Whenever they heard my name they clustered about my horse, shouted and prayed in their peculiar style which had a natural eloquence that would have moved a stone. I have witnessed hundreds, if not thousands of such scenes, and can see now a poor girl in the very ecstasy of the Methodist ‘shout,’ hugging the banner of one of the regiments and jumping to the ‘feet of Jesus’.... I walked up to a plantation house close by, where were assembled many Negroes, among them an old gray-haired man of as fine a head as I ever saw. I asked him if he understood about the war and its progress. He said he did; that he had been looking for the ‘Angel of the Lord’ ever since he was knee-high, and though we professed to be fighting for the Union he supposed that slavery was the cause, and that our success was to be his freedom....”

That was the characteristic Negro point of view—the expectation of the “Coming of the Lord,” the coming of the angel of deliverance. Their only lore was the Bible, and their especial guide was the Old Testament. Despite all talk of their masters, talk which would have been dismissed as “eyewash” in the war of 1918, they believed that God had sent to rescue them. They waited the miraculous. Sherman was God’s messenger.

So the glorious sixty thousand broke into quiet Georgia—_carrying salvation to the sea_—in an ever memorable way. The foe, stupefied by defeat, was massing on the one hand at Augusta and on the other at Macon, bluffed on the left and on the right, while in the center the unprobed purpose of the general reigned in secret but supreme.

The Twentieth Corps on the extreme left went by Madison, giving color to a proposed attack on Augusta. The Fifteenth feinted at Macon, the cavalry galloping right up to that city and inviting a sortie. The Seventeenth Corps was in close support of the Fifteenth, and the Fourteenth kept in the center. It was the route of the Fourteenth that I decided to follow, and it was also the way along which went Sherman himself. It was generally understood by the Fourteenth Corps that Milledgeville was its object at the end of a week’s marching. The order of march for the morrow was issued overnight by army commanders to corps commanders and then passed on to all ranks. The men slept in the open, and beside watch fires which burned all night. Outposts and sentries kept guard, though there were few alarms. The warm Southern night with never a touch of frost, even in November, passed over the sleeping army. Reveille was early, commonly at four o’clock, when the last watch of the night was relieved. The unwanted clarion shrilled through men’s slumbers, blown by urgent drummer boys. The bugles of the morning sounded, and then slowly but unmistakably the whole camp began to rouse from its stertorousness, and one man here, another there, would start up to stir the smouldering embers of the fires and make them all begin to blaze; and then began the hubbub of cleaning and the hubbub of cooking, the neighing of horses, the clatter of wagon-packing and harnessing. Reveille was made easier by the prospects of wonderful breakfasts—not mere army rations, the bully and hard-tack of a later war, but all that a rich countryside could be made to provide—“potatoes frying nicely in a well-larded pan, the chicken roasting delicately on the red-hot coals, the grateful fumes of coffee,” says one chronicler of the time—fried slices of turkey, roast pig, sweet yams, sorghum syrup, and corn fortified the soldier for the day’s march. Horses and mules also fared astonishingly well, and amid braying and neighing and pawing huge quantities of fodder were provided. Then once more insistent bugles called; knapsacks and equipment were strapped on, the horses and mules were put in the traces, the huge droves of cattle were marshaled into the road, and the army with its officers and sergeants and wagons and guns and pontoons and impedimenta of every kind (did not Sherman always carry two of everything?) moved on.

There was something about the aspect of the army on the march that was like a great moving show. The musical composition of “Marching Thro’ Georgia” has caught it:

Hurrah! Hurrah! We bring the Jubilee! All hail the flag, the flag which sets you free! So we brought salvation from Atlanta to the Sea, When we were marching thro’ Georgia.

The clangor of brass, the braying of mules, the shouts of the soldiers, the ecstasy of the Negroes, and then the proud starry flag of the Union!

The procession has all long since gone by, and men speak of the famous deeds “as half-forgotten things.” It is a quiet road over the hill and down into the vale with never a soldier or a bugle horn. Cotton, cotton, cotton, and cotton pickers and tiny cabins, and then maize stalks, corn from which long since the fruit has been cut, now withered, warped, shrunken, half fallen in every attitude of old age and despair. It is a diversified country of hill and dale, with occasionally a huge gray wooden mansion with broad veranda running round, and massive columns supporting overhanging roof. The columns, which are veritable pine trunks just trimmed and planed or sawn, give quite a classical air to the Southern home. Sometimes there will be seven or eight of these sun-bleached columns on the frontage of a house, and the first impression is one of stone or marble.